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Author /shawn.blais

shawn.blais

Shawn has worked as programmer and product designer for over 15 years. He has extensive programming experience with ActionScript, SQL, PHP, Javascript and C#, as well as deep proficiency with motion graphics and UX design. Shawn is currently the Lead Developer, and Product Director for TreeFortress Games, focusing on the creation of our own game titles for sale across Desktop and Console platforms.

If you’re not familiar, Bardbarian is an iOS/Android game, built with Adobe AIR and the Starling Framework, and is slated for a Spring/Summer release in 2013. TreeFortress is a seperate division of gskinner, focused solely on creating our own apps and games. Follow them directly if you’re interested!

One of the toughest aspects of doing Game Development with GPU rendering, is managing the texture size of your various animations. Traditional SpriteSheets consume texture memory extremely quickly, and in the age of Retina Devices, they’re starting to prove inadequate.

To help work around this problem, our guys at TreeFortress have put together a library called SpriterAS. SpriterAS is a plugin which allows you to playback Spriter Animations (.SCML files) in AIR using Starling/Stage3D.

What is Spriter?Spriter is a tool for creating so-called ‘modular’ animations which require a very small texture footprint. This enables long, complex animations running at a smooth 60fps.

For full details, examples and code snippets, check out the blog post over at treefortress.com!

Also, in case you’re wondering, we are planning on creating a Javascript version for use with EaselJS in the future 🙂

TreeFortress is a new arm of the company, focused on building mobile games (or apps) and bringing them to market. Initially, we will be using AIR + Starling as our core development stack, possibly branching out to Unity3D or HTML in the future.

TreeFortress will have its own blog which will include posts on our development workflow and upcoming games. Expect lots of code snippets, workflow tools, and tons of cool Artwork.

If you’re interested, you can follow us on your preferred social network: